Customers commonly visit brick-and-mortar stores such as retail stores, grocery stores, consumer electronic boutiques, etc. in order to purchase goods from such stores. When visiting such stores, a customer often fills a shopping basket or wheeled shopping cart with items selected for purchase. After filling the shopping basket or wheeled shopping cart with items, the customer then proceeds to a checkout lane where a sales associate enters each item into a point of sale terminal in order to determine the total purchase price for the items selected by the customer. Moreover, the sales associate collects payment from the customer and provides the customer with a sales receipt or some other form of proof of purchase for the selected and paid for items. After checking out via one of the provided checkout lanes, the customer is then free to leave the brick-and-mortar store with the purchased items.
While the above conventional shopping and checkout process is generally effective, there are times in which the above process does not work well. For example, during periods of high activity (e.g., the Christmas shopping season), a brick-and-mortar store may simply be unable to keep up with the flow of customers resulting in long waits at the checkout lanes. During such periods, it is not uncommon for customers to abandon carts full of merchandise and leave the store empty handed. Not only is such behavior costly from the standpoint of lost sales, but such abandonments also increase the cost of operation due to time spent returning the abandoned items to their appropriate place in the store. The matter is even worse if the abandoned items include perishable items (e.g., ice cream) and an employee does not discover the abandoned items until after such perishable items have spoiled thus rendering such items unsuitable for sale and possibly rendering other non-perishable items in the same cart/basket also unsuitable for sale.
Besides discussed issues resulting in abandonment of selected items, other aspects of the conventional brick-and-mortar shopping experience may also be improved and/or enhanced. The following provides numerous methods and systems which attempt to improve and/or enhance various aspects of the conventional shopping experience. To this end, limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches should become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application.